Suggestions / For Hypervisor

[glennda]

our servers running all the vm's including a couple of server 2008's do not have hyper threaded processors.

 

Toby

[Ric_]

 

(seriously, does anyone know where I can buy one of these?)

 

* Multiple x 3mm Flashing LEDs : 3mm Flashing LEDs : Maplin

* 1 x 9V Switched Battery Box : Battery Boxes : Maplin

* 1 x Undrilled Standard Rack Mounting Panels : Rack Mounting Cases : Maplin

* Some wire

* 1 x Hot glue gun

* 1 x Drill

* 1 x Soldering iron

 

[john]

I've just ordered 3x HP Proliant DL360 G6's with 24GB Ram in each and Dual Quad Core Xeons and a small pile of SAS Drives for my new Virtualised systems. I will be running Citrix XenServer on them connecting them to my nice shiny Sun S7110 SAN for the storage

 

Yummy Yummy Network Ahead

 

Will be virtualising 12 physical servers onto 2 hosts (one box is for Exchange temp then maybe just used for SQL but still playing with ideas) but I only actually need 2 hosts for the all the LAN, 3 gives me plenty of breathing space to play around and move stuff around and run every service / system on its own OS and not double up which is also a great benefit of Virtualisation

[PiqueABoo]

12 physical servers onto 2 hosts

 

Three boxes is begging for some kind of failover cluster, or whatever your favourite virtualisation product calls that, isn't it? The VMs and load all nicely spread out with enough slack to squeeze the VMs from one (dead/down) box on to the other two?

[Butuz]

3 hosts sounds like it will be perfect - I wish I could have got 3 hosts but the budget was not there and had to go for 2.

 

You using VMWare?

 

I too am in the process of creating new vServers for everything. Having one service / one app per member server is a really good idea in terms of reliaiblity! Only cost is a 2k3/2k8 standard licence? Cheap!

 

Butuz

[john]

Three boxes is begging for some kind of failover cluster, or whatever your favourite virtualisation product calls that, isn't it? The VMs and load all nicely spread out with enough slack to squeeze the VMs from one (dead/down) box on to the other two?

 

I will have the Citrix Essentials for XenServer on them once I get them setup which gives load balancing, automated failover and other clever things

Citrix Systems Products -- XenServer Essentials for XenServer Unlike the VMWare style per CPU for these advanced features, with Citrix its per host so if you have lots of CPUs in your hosts (like Ric does) this is a very cheap way of getting it, so as my hosts are Dual Quad Cores, under VMWare I'd have to pay for 6 licences for all those fancy features (I've forgotten the name of the VMWare ones) but under Citrix I just pay for 3 Hosts instead.

 

I will only have 2 hosts to start with though, the 3rd box is being used for Exchange on the old network, so will build up the new LAN in VMs on the 2 other units and once that has been completed and up and running I can add the 3rd host back in.

 

I would expect to be very able to run them all on 2 hosts when we get them setup but like you say the 3 will be a sweet setup and allow for a host to fail and move them around without murdering the network performance etc.

 

 

I too am in the process of creating new vServers for everything. Having one service / one app per member server is a really good idea in terms of reliaiblity! Only cost is a 2k3/2k8 standard licence? Cheap!

 

Butuz

 

Don't forget you can use Enterprise Edition and get 4 (I think its 4....) licenses for the price of 1 as it were (they are for VM Use only the others so you cannot get 1x EE and run 5 Physical Boxes) and if you are going to have more than a certain number it is cheaper to get Data Centre Licences, these are licences per CPU I think and give unlimited VMs.

[tmcd35]

 

Don't forget you can use Enterprise Edition and get 4 (I think its 4....) licenses for the price of 1 as it were (they are for VM Use only the others so you cannot get 1x EE and run 5 Physical Boxes) and if you are going to have more than a certain number it is cheaper to get Data Centre Licences, these are licences per CPU I think and give unlimited VMs.

 

Datacenter is indeed charged per *physical* CPU (not per core). It should be roughly the same price as Enterpise. Given that...

 

1 x Physical CPU - Datacenter is always cheaper (effectively) than Enterprise

2 x Physical CPU - Datacenter is cheaper if you *may* need to run 5 or more VM's at any time

4 x Physical CPU - Datacenter is cheaper if you *may* need to run 16 or more VM's at any time

 

Remember, just because you only want to run 3 or 4 VM's on the host as standard, you may one day need to temporarily host VM's from another server as part of a failover. Or indeed you may suddenly need to roll out a new server (some silly teacher decides AQA online exams is a good idea?).

 

So Datacenter could be worth the investment anyway for future proofing and/or fail over recovery.

[tmcd35]

Thanks - bit of a show stopper with the Xeons......... I was getting all excited.

 

@Mattx - Just thought I'd give you an update. The server has arrived. Can't say I'm impressed, maybe you should look at another model. The hotswap bays and SAS connectors only cover the first two bays. You need to buy an additional cable/hotswap kit for the third and forth bays.

 

Plugging an additional SAS cable into the controller card is 'tight' to say the least. And everything is screwed down with bloody Torx screws - arrgggghhhhhh! 6 of the things just to remove the PCI riser and plug in an assitional SAS cable that barel fitted.

 

Not happy!

[glennda]

@Mattx - Just thought I'd give you an update. The server has arrived. Can't say I'm impressed, maybe you should look at another model. The hotswap bays and SAS connectors only cover the first two bays. You need to buy an additional cable/hotswap kit for the third and forth bays.

 

Plugging an additional SAS cable into the controller card is 'tight' to say the least. And everything is screwed down with bloody Torx screws - arrgggghhhhhh! 6 of the things just to remove the PCI riser and plug in an assitional SAS cable that barel fitted.

 

Not happy!

 

yeah the one we have here is a bit fiddly as well but then again there's not that many times when you actually have to keep opening them up. but i can see the hotswap kit not being there as being annoying - but the one i have only has to 72gb disk in raid 1+0 and is connected via fibre to the san for the additional storage

[bossman]

@mattx:

 

Do ya mean one of these what Geordi La Forge (Hypervisor) has been using for eons:

[john]

@Mattx - Just thought I'd give you an update. The server has arrived. Can't say I'm impressed, maybe you should look at another model. The hotswap bays and SAS connectors only cover the first two bays. You need to buy an additional cable/hotswap kit for the third and forth bays.

 

Plugging an additional SAS cable into the controller card is 'tight' to say the least. And everything is screwed down with bloody Torx screws - arrgggghhhhhh! 6 of the things just to remove the PCI riser and plug in an assitional SAS cable that barel fitted.

 

Not happy!

Couple of things, depending on your base model but your reseller should have checked that before you bought it, assuming you talked to them to get the spec checked and dind't just order the bits. For example my new kit has 4 Hot Swap bays as standard but I want 8 on one so I know I need the drive bay expansion kit and cable kit etc so Insight put it all into the pot as it were for me and made sure I have all the fiddly cables.

 

As for Torx, some of them will be Thumb Torx and they always have had, even on my DL180 (previous G though to yours no doubt) had a Torx drive on the back / inside the chasis clipped in so you always have one to hand.

 

Looking forward to Tuesday next week when I should receive all my new shiny goodies